Free Republic

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is pressing Vanita Gupta, the nominee for the number three position at the Justice Department, over millions of dollars in stock holdings she has in a chemical company that makes a key ingredient that Mexican drug cartels use to make heroin. Gupta holds between $11 million and $55 million in shares of Avantor, a Pennsylvania-based chemical company, according to financial disclosures she has filed with the Office of Government Ethics. Gupta’s father, Raj Gupta, serves as chairman of the board of Avantor. Gupta is the wealthiest political nominee that President Joe Biden has picked while in...

Sunni militant group Jaish al-Adl claims responsibility for killing of guards in Sistan-Baluchestan province Ten Iranian border guards have been killed by Sunni militants in a cross-border attack on the frontier with Pakistan, according to the Tasnim news agency.. “Ten border guards of Mirjaveh county in Sistan-Baluchestan province were martyred in an ambush by the terrorists in the Pakistani border’s zero-point,” Tasnim said. In a statement carried on state media, Iranian police said the guards were killed by long-range guns and “the Pakistani government bears the ultimate responsibility of the attack”. The Sistan-Baluchestan province in south-east Iran has long been...

One of the victims who gave evidence in court against the Oxford child sexual exploitation ring has told the Guardian how she was groomed, raped and trafficked while in the care of Oxfordshire county council. Girl C's abuse began just after her 13th birthday. By the age of 14, the gang had got her addicted to hard drugs and was regularly trafficking the teenager across the country to be raped by strangers. By 16, Girl C was pregnant, not by one of the convicted men. She finally managed to escape only after her son was born, when the gang threatened...

Just what the United states needed in Pakistan right now, their unstable government took another big hit today when the Pakistan Supreme Court ruled that the amnesty protection afforded President Zadari will be treated as if it never happened. President Zadari who with his wife Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who has since been murdered is suspected in stealing millions of dollars from the Pakistan government coffers through out the years. The Pakistani people have a nick name for Zardari, "Mr. 10%". The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the National Reconciliation Ordinance, which grants amnesty to some 8,000 senior politicians, bureaucrats...

A Jacksonville physician caught traveling to meet a 15-year-old girl for sex told police his explicit online chats with teenage girls revealed their stupidity and America’s immorality. Irfan Nawaz, 32, said he chatted with who he thought were eight to 10 teenage girls and laughed to himself about how stupid and promiscuous they were, according to his 2008 confession played in court Friday...

09/25/2007 - By Michael Scheuer (from Terrorism Focus, September 25) - More than six years after the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden remains free, healthy and safe enough to produce audio- and videotapes that dominate the international media at the times of his choosing (Terrorism Focus, September 11). Popular and some official attitudes in the United States and its NATO allies tend to denigrate the efforts made by their military and intelligence services to capture the al-Qaeda chief. The common question always is, "Why can't the U.S. superpower and its allies find one 6'5" Saudi with an extraordinarily well-known...

PARACHINAR: Tension gripped Kurram Agency on Wednesday as the Pakistan Army sent reinforcements to the Pak-Afghan border following reports that the Afghan National Army had deployed in significant numbers on the Durand Line along with extra artillery and mortar guns. The situation became even more serious in the evening when the political administration decided to make announcements from mosques and through vehicles fitted with loudspeakers about the possibility of outbreak of firing on the Pak-Afghan border. It advised the people not to become scared due to intense firing because this would be due to the situation on the border and...

Muslim unrest as police carry out new raids By Nick Britten and Nigel Bunyan Last Updated: 8:08am GMT 03/02/2007 Police raided three more addresses in Birmingham yesterday as they continued to question nine men over their involvement in the alleged plot to kidnap and behead a serving British Muslim soldier. Men leave Birmingham Central mosque after Friday prayers No further arrests were made but West Midlands Police said that a "significant quantity of exhibits" taken from the 12 other properties were being examined following Wednesday's arrests. Officers were granted an extension to hold the men until Feb 5 and said...

Here is an interesting little slice of contemporary English life. The police go to a pub in a small town in Devon, looking for a suspect. They see a man there who they think resembles the suspect, and approach him. He becomes abusive and they arrest him and take him down to the station. He is drunk. After a couple of hours in a jail cell, he says he feels sick and demands a doctor. The police call the police surgeon. When he arrives (he is an Indian), the arrested man says, “I want an English doctor, not a f*cking...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 29, 2006 – U.S. and Afghan noncommissioned officers toured the Pakistan Army’s Junior Leader Academy in Shinkiari, Pakistan, Dec. 28 during the second day of an exchange program tour. Pakistan Army Sgt. Usman, right, a Junior Leader Academy instructor, greets U.S. Army Command Sgt. Maj. Daniel Wood, command sergeant major Combined Forces Command Afghanistan, and Sgt. Maj. Safi Roshan, command sergeant major of the Afghan National Army in Shinkiari, Pakistan, Dec. 28, 2006.  '(Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Pakistan officers and NCOs briefed the team on training procedures and processes in an effort to strengthen the...

'5 units of Pak Army made India shudder in Kargil' New Delhi: Digging old dirt, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has squarely blamed India for the Kargil conflict, claiming that the conflict occurred because of India's attempts to find a casus belli (an event or political occurrence that brings about a declaration of war) by reporting 'make-belief attacks' from the Pakistani side.

NEW DELHI -- Pakistan said it has destroyed some militant camps in troubled Balochistan province. Human Rights Groups in the country have described the action as alarming and asked the government to initiate dialogue with rebels. "Paramilitary forces have eliminated outlaws camps up to some extent in operations in different regions of Kohlu district in Balochistan," said Interior Minister Mir Mohammad Shoiab. The Times of India newspaper Friday quoted him as saying the government was determined to destroy the camps to facilitate a development process that would bring the province to the same development levels as other regions of the...

Man butchers his four daughters in Pakistan (DPA) 25 December 2005 ISLAMABAD - A labourer slit throats of his four daughters in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province when his eldest daughter married of her own choice, a news report said on Sunday. The Daily Times said Nazeer Ahmed, a resident of Burewala town of Punjab, committed the crime late Saturday while girls were sleeping at home. “He brought his married daughter Muqaddas Bibi, 25, home from her in-laws. They had dinner and when all girls slept, he butchered them with sharp knife,” senior police officer, Mukhtar Iqbal Tikka told the newspaper....

PESHAWAR: Federal Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao on Friday conceded the loss of 11 soldiers in two days of fighting in North Waziristan as helicopter gunships again bombed villages to flush out militants who have been offering stiff resistance to Pakistan Army troops. The intense fighting has caused casualties on both sides and forced hundreds of villagers to evacuate to safer places. The village of Khattay Killay, scene of most of the fighting, has reportedly been emptied of the population due to the intense exchange of fire in the area and the constant threat to life and property. Precise casualty figures...

A Pakistani, convicted of exporting missile parts to Iran almost 20 years ago, is being accused in a San Diego court of conspiring to smuggle jet engine components from the United States to Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium (and IRAN). Arif Ali Durrani, 55, was initially accused of illegally exporting through his defunct California-based company called Lonestar Aerospace, 110 compressor blades for the General Electric J-85 military aircraft engine to Jordan. Those charges were dropped on Sept 23 after the US Attorney?s Office determined that the Jordan government had a license to receive the goods. The same day,...

The best way to confront the US and EU3 dictatorship is to "impose an embargo on oil sales to those countries, said an English-language paper here Sunday commenting on last Thursday "unfair" resolution of the UN nuclear watchdog against Iran. The 'Tehran Times' suggested in its editorial that the world oil-rich states should form a united front in order to confront "Western neocolonialist countries." Criticizing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution against Iran, the paper said that it was ratified "to meet the objectives of the Zionist regime and the United States." It added that the resolution, issued under...

The teenage terrorist who blew up a double-deck bus in Tavistock Square, London, killing 13 people including himself, was caught on closed-circuit television two and a half hours earlier. Hasib Hussain, bearded and wearing jeans and a jacket, was pictured at Luton railway station as he and three other bombers headed for the 7.20am train to London last Thursday. In his rucksack was the 10lb bomb that exploded at 9.47am on the No 30 bus shortly after three other bombs went off in Underground trains. Hussain, 18, a nondescript character, troublesome at home in Leeds and an under-achiever at school,...

A Pakistani man and some of his relatives chopped off his wife's feet after accusing her of being promiscuous, police said yesterday. The woman survived the gruesome attack, the latest in a wave of assaults that have raised international concern about the plight of women in rural Pakistan. 'It is a shameful act of cruelty against a woman,' said Talat Ali, a senior police official in Punjab.' The 32-year-old woman told police her feet were chopped off on 24 June by her husband, her father-in-law, a brother-in-law and two others after they accused her of being 'of bad character', a...

NASA has dedicated its new Altix supercomputer 'KC' to the memory of India-born astronaut Kalpana Chawla, one of the seven crew members aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia which disintegrated midair in February last year. Naming the new supercomputer 'Kalpana' follows a long tradition at NASA's Ames Research Centre of calling its new supercomputers after pioneers in the supercomputer industry or individuals who have significantly contributed to research at the aircraft research laboratory. "It is indeed an honour to name NASA's new SGI Altix 3000 supercomputer after Kalpana Chawla," said Ames Centre Director G Scott Hubbard. "She was not only a...